Mindfulness and Leadership Part Two: Visualising

Visualisation of goals and outcomes is fast becoming one of the “hot things to do” in mindfulness, but does it bring value to your leadership journey?

Although there are hugely popular and successful people who practice mindfulness, what I am curious about is where practicing mindfulness can benefit the everyday leader. The aspiring, seasoned or expert leader who everyday has to deal with a multitude of problems, decisions and people. Therefore, in this five-part series I will be discussing five areas of mindfulness and exploring the benefits to leadership behaviours. Part one covered the first two areas: Self-awareness & Gratitude. Part two will move on to the second area: Visualising.

Also, as a bonus to those who read the entire five-part series, I will build and share a mindfulness focus routine so that by the end of the series you will understand fully how easily you can adopt it into your life and leadership journey.

Missed part one: Self-awareness & gratitude?

Why?

Today, I use visualising as one of the most powerful tools today for future goal and outcome planning, but to be honest, I struggled with this at the beginning. I consider myself quite creative, but I had spent years not accessing my creativity so I struggled to create a picture of what the outcome would look like. I tried vision boards which didn’t help much. I then moved on to writing which helped me to be able to create a picture, but was a difficult and lengthy process. Lastly, I practiced visualising which I found to be the most powerful tool.

I spent some time learning from great teachers, such as Tony Robbins, who taught me the benefits of visualising so I began to practice by adding it to my daily routine. What I found was that I was more determined to meet my goals, I was more passionate because I could see an outcome, and I was also able to better see how I could bring a team together for one vision thinking.

As a leader, if I was unable to see the clear outcome ahead I would struggle to communicate to my team a one vision approach to meet out combined goal. So visualising the goal allowed me to better understand the approach ahead, and become better at communicating that approach to my team. Communication is one of the essential behaviours of a leader, so by visualising I was able to become a better communicator which in turn, made me a better leader.

How?

You cannot predict the future, simple. However, you can create a clear image of how you want to the future to pan out. Without visualisation, whenever you try to imagine the future it may often be hazy and cloudy and you may struggle to see a path ahead, which makes decisions more difficult.

Visualising allows you to develop a clearer image in your mind of the future and when then image is clear in your mind your body understands what it needs to do to achieve it. Don’t believe me?

Dr. Biasiotto, in the 1950s at the University of Chicago, carried out an incredible study to prove the power of visualisation. Dr. Biasiotto took 90 students with no real basketball experiences and told them to make free throws whilst recording their results. He then gave each group the following instructions:

1. Group 1 were to practice free throws for one hour every day for 30 days
2. Group 2 were to only visualise throwing and scoring free throws for 30 days
3. Group 3 were to do nothing for 30 days

These were the results:

1. Group 1 improved by 24%
2. Group 2 improved by 23!!
3. Group 3 did not improve as expected.

Group 2, the group who did not touch a basketball for 30 days, but only visualise the act of throwing and scoring free throws improved, nearly almost as much as the group who practiced for an hour every day!

That is the power of visualisation.

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What?

Step two in the mindfulness plan is to visualise your future focusing on the most important driver in your life, goal or task right now. Here are the steps to help you do that:

1. Breathe deeply to calm for mind for 30 seconds
2. Create a picture in your mind of where you are today, for example, the task or your current situation
3. Cast your mind forward to what you want to achieve, for example, how do you visualise the presentation to the CEOs going, or how do you visualise your life in ten years?
4. Focus on that image and feel what it would feel like to reach that goal
5. Create an image of passion growing inside of you with energy focused on achieving that goal, for example I visualise a fire growing within me
6. State that you will achieve your desired outcome

The power of visualisation has helped millions of others achieve their desired outcomes and goals. It has also helped some of the most successful leaders in the world today stay disciplined and become who they are. So in answer to my first question, “does it bring value to your leadership journey?” The answer is yes. I urge to you to incorporate visualisation into your mindfulness routine and explore the benefits for yourself.

Continue the process with part three: Unconscious awareness.

Thank you for reading, JT.

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